Quotes About Memory

Lives had been spent here—people had loved one another and eaten and drunk and laughed and betrayed and been afraid of death—and not a single fragment of that remained. White stones, black shadows.

De blik die hij zich zo goed herinnerde van toen hij haar lesgaf, die uitdrukking van blanco, ongenaakbaar verzet, schuilde achter haar ogen.

It was one of those moments when we suddenly recall a dream that we've unaccountably forgotten, and back in a flood comes all the emotion we felt in our sleep

She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever.

Mientras volaba en silencio volvió la vista atrás, como si le persiguiera su miedo. Edmund Spenser

She flung a mental lifeline to that physical self, and tried to recall the feeling of being in it: all the sensations that made up being alive. The exact touch of her friend Atal's soft-tipped trunk caressing her neck. The taste of bacon and eggs. The triumphant strain in her muscles as she pulled herself up a rock face. The delicate dancing of her fingers on a computer keyboard. The smell of roasting coffee. The warmth of her bed on a winter night.

I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?

It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.

Noi siamo, dopotutto, la somma delle nostre esperienze, e l'esperienza comprende non soltanto ciò che facciamo concretamente, ma anche ciò che privatamente immaginiamo.

True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it - either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.

As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words - words born either of imagination or forthrightness.

Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detailthe rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that'll be packed on your grave when you're dead

To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory—to him if a man's not made of memory, he's made of nothing.

One's story isn't a skin to be shed— it's inescapable, one's body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you.

Pensando na morte de seu irmão - e no ataque mortal do pai - me peguei comparando aquele sorriso seu com um curativo sobre uma ferida. (p.75)

ero una biografia in moto perpetuo, memoria sino al midollo delle ossa.

Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about – your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about.

Though I'd never forgotten Alan, I hadn't uttered his name aloud in the many years since he'd died, back in that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb, and polio.

They were still talking about polio, now by recalling its frightening precursors. His grandmother was remembering when whooping cough victims were required to wear armbands and how, before a vaccine was developed, the most dreaded disease in the city was diphtheria. She remembered getting one of the first smallpox vaccinations. The site of the injection had become seriously infected, and she had a large, uneven circle of scarred flesh on her upper right arm as a result.

Never before—the great refrain of 1942.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting," wrote the Czech novelist Milan Kundera.

Only a fool loves war," said Calvar, "or a man who has never seen it. The trouble is that the survivors forget about the horrors and remember only the battle lust. They pass on that memory, and other men hunger for it.

But remember this: to have may be taken from you, to have had never.